I think that most programmers (myself included) generally don't reference most of their palettes to each other. There are times when this is hugely useful, but most of the time my (position) palettes have hard values pointing to a specific point on stage.

I do agree that having a preference would allow users to customize this behaviour to their own needs. I've opened enhancement #10268 to request this and I've added your comments to the request.

My request is because if you have a reference palette already existing and you want to modifie it you must reselect "allow ref". The option would be: if you have saved a palette one time with allow ref, it will stay reference even if you update or merge new values, since you unselect allow ref button.

When you are editing a palette in an editor, it will keep and properlry update references if the palette is already a reference palette. You don't need to make changes to the update toolbar before you update.

If you want the console to intelligently use references when merging into a reference palette from the programmer, then we'll need to make some changes to the allow refs button on the record and merge toolbars. Currently the button defaults to off. We would need to default it to flat (not on or off) so that users could explicitly turn allow refs on or off.

Mentioning Position, on Big Rig shows, I might have three levels of embedded ref palettes. For example, G1, G2, Keys, Drums, Perc, Bass, Vox 1, Vox 2, Vox 3, Vox 4, Vox 5, Stage Pos1 - Stage Pos 10, and Aud Pos1 - Aud Pos 20 would all be foundation palettes.The second tier would be Band 1 -Band 10, Vox GRP1 - Vox GRP10, Stage Look1 - Stage Look20, Aud Look1 - Aud Look 20.The third Tier would be "[Song name] V1 Look1", "[Song name] V1 Look2", "[Song name] V2 Look1", "[Song name] V2 Look2", "[Song name] Pre-Chorus Look1", "[Song name] Pre-Chorus Look2", etc.It would be nice if there were a way to have comments that would track through in the allow ref palette building that could give me the ability to see for example what "aud look" or "band look" was in the "verse 2 pos" palette instead of seeing 100 lights and 100 individual pos palettes. The idea is that I will create a cuelist cue called "Take" (the word from a song) which is cue 85 in a list and use "Verse 2 pos" in it. When I open the editor, I don't want to see the individual light palettes, I want to see the 2nd tier group palettes instead but know that if I change tier one, it will reference through to tier 2 and tier three.I've tried as best as I can to explain this but feel free to ask more questions. This would be a feature that would literally save hundreds of man-hours of programming time.